We all know that reforming our schools is going to be a difficult and complicated job. Making major changes in a complicated system always is. But Barbara Lerner believes that there are some simple and effective steps we can take to raise student achievement. She gives us this piece of promising news in a paper called "Rethinking Education's Cinderella Reform."
Lerner, who is a lawyer and a psychologist, is no Pollyanna. She acknowledges that student achievement in the U.S. is just as dismal as everyone says. Maybe worse. She points out that during the past decade the big achievement gap between U.S. students and students in other industrialized nations got even bigger. But Lerner believes we can begin to close this gap by the end of the century.
How? By learning and applying the lesson of the minimum competency movement - a reform that Lerner acknowledges is generally discounted but that she calls the only successful education reform of the last 30 years.
The minimum competency movement, a reform instituted by 20 or so states during the late 70s and early 80s, that required students to be able to read simple material and perform simple calculations before they could get high school diplomas. On the one hand, this reform was assailed by educators who believed that it demanded too little and that the minimums would become the ceiling of student achievement. And it was denounced on the other hand by people who believed it demanded too much. This was just one more burden, they said, for poor, minority children. It would deny them diplomas and thus a chance for further education and decent jobs. It would destroy their self-esteem; it smacked of racism.
In fact, Lerner says, the minimum competency reform achieved exactly what was intended. In 1975, a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test of functional literacy found that 57 percent of 17 year-olds still in school were illiterate or semi-literate. By the late 80s -- after nearly 15 years of minimum competency standards for high school graduation -- virtually all of our in-school 17-year- olds were literate and numerate. That is, they were able to read simple, everyday materials and perform simple calculations.
The achievements of minority students were especially striking. Take the case of Florida, where the minimum competency law was challenged in court. On the first few tries, 80 to 90 percent of the state's high-school minority students failed the test. But they didn't drop out, as some people had predicted. And by the fifth try, over 90 percent passed. Or, consider, NAEP, says Lerner. In 1975, 80 percent of the 17-year-old African-American students who were still in school were illiterate or semi-literate; now nearly all are literate and numerate. Furthermore, unlike their white colleagues, they have improved their average scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. So the minimum competency movement didn't place a ceiling on student achievement; it helped raise it.
Why did this reform work? Lerner says it was in part because its aims were modest. But more important, she believes, were four characteristics of the minimum competency movement that were absent in the more ambitious "excellence" movement of the 80s.
The minimum competency movement had a single, clear standard -- Can you read and do arithmetic at this level? Second, success at meeting this standard was measurable with a single test. Third, there were important incentives involved: Kids didn't get their high school diplomas until they passed the test; they knew what they were supposed to do, and they knew what was at stake. Finally, teachers were treated like professionals. The standards were prescribed, but teachers were free to decide how to get their students to achieve them.
Lerner suggests that we apply these lessons to a more ambitious program to raise student achievement. She would retain current minimum competency standards but make them the standards for entering instead of graduating from high school. This standard, she says, would give students the foundation to achieve a lot more in high school than most do now. And she'd introduce new, advanced standards for students graduating from high school, entering college and graduating from college. The issue is not can our students achieve at higher levels -- it's figuring out how schools can stimulate them to do so. And Lerner believes that a system of advanced competencies with clearly articulated goals and incentives could do this.
Lerner presents some pretty strong evidence for her conclusions about the mm1mum competency reform but there are still unanswered questions. How does student achievement in states where there is no minimum competency requirement compare with states with the requirement? What influence might Head Start programs or Chapter I have had on the dramatic increase in functional literacy and numeracy? These and other questions ought to be taken up because Lerner has a serious proposal that merits serious attention.